From After Downing Street
By David Swanson

The debate among progressive activists and commentators in recent weeks has tended to range from the leave-Obama-alone-and-he’ll-fix-everything position to the stage-a-protest-at-Obama’s-house-for-the-next-month position, including numerous stances in between those extremes. What all these positions share is acceptance of the incredible shift of power from Congress to the White House that we have seen in just the last eight years. It is in these concluding moments of the Bush-Cheney era that Congress’s coffin is being constructed just outside our window, and I’m afraid that the peace and justice movement is picking flowers to bring to the funeral.

Congress is corrupted by money, media, and parties, and it has chosen its impotence. We’ve replaced a disastrous president with one who can’t help but be in at least some ways dramatically better. Why in the world would we distract ourselves with worrying about Congress? The frightening reason is this: if we leave all power in the hands of the president, sooner or later all power will belong to someone even worse than Bush. The hopeful reason is this: the only possible path to truly transformative democratic change lies in re-empowering and reforming Congress. It may take some of us a few more months to consider the possibility of that. It may take us generations to prove it. The authors of the U.S. Constitution were closer to grasping it than we are.

Congress was supposed to write every law. The president can now ignore laws at his or her whim and rewrite new laws with signing statements. Congress was supposed to have the exclusive power to begin wars and the power to end wars. The president now does both and even negotiates treaties authorizing war without even obtaining Senate authorization of the treaties. Congress was supposed to raise and spend every dime. Now the White House simply invents or borrows trillions of dollars and gives it away without any pretense of authorization or oversight. The Iraq “Status of Forces Agreement” and the ongoing Wall Street “bailout” are eleventh hour nails in Congress’s coffin.

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